Bitwise: Tokenization Could Be the Biggest Crypto Trade of the Decade

Ish Asad (0:00)

We have a tsunami of capital coming on chain in the form of stable coins, tokenized stocks and other assets. And that's going to...

John Gilland (0:07)

Bitcoin is fighting to hold on to the $78,000 level. The mean coin trenches on Robinhood are going wild, and somewhere in all of this is the future of finance. Hello and welcome to Milk Road Crypto, the podcast that knows that some digital assets are a generational investment opportunity, and some are an IQ test, and some are somehow both at the same time. I'm your host, John Gilland. Today is Wednesday, September 9th, and today we are joined by two guests from Bitwise, Ryan Rasmussen, the head of research at Bitwise, back on the show again, an old friend and fan favorite, and joining him for the first time is Ish Asad, a research analyst at Bitwise who, and fun fact, this is true, he literally won his job in a contest that Matt Hogan ran. I'm going to get to him to tell us all about that because I'm really curious to hear more.

He's got to have some kind of alpha to share with us. If that sounds good with you, make sure you all like and subscribe, share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it. As a reminder, our podcast today is free and that would not be possible without our wonderful sponsors at Sabre.Money, the stable coin payments platform built for Asia. So keep an ear out for more information on them later in the episode. But for now, welcome back to the Milk Road show and welcome for the first time, Ish. Ryan, gentlemen, how are you today?

Ryan Rasmussen (1:11)

Great to be here.

Ish Asad (1:12)

Thanks for having us.

John Gilland (1:14)

Well, I'm excited to get into it. There's a lot going on in crypto these days. Ryan, first, welcome back, but just sit still for a second because I want to introduce the audience to Ish.

Ish, I want to start with this story. You didn't get your job at Bitwise through a normal interview process. Matt Hogan was running a contest. You won the contest. What was the contest? How did you win? Tell me about this. What happened?

Ish Asad (1:34)

Yeah, it was pretty awesome. First job that I've ever applied to, let alone got on Twitter or X. I was just, you know, look at the time, looking to go deeper into the industry, stumbled across the first Bitwise Research Hiring Contest posed by Matt on X. It was whoever can make the best Bitcoin Treasury presentation wins the job.

I had no idea who the competitors would be like. I also saw it about like five to seven days into the competition window. So I had like three days left. But it's one of those scenarios where I feel like you just, if you tell yourself you're gonna win it, then you behave like someone who is gonna win it, and then you win it. So I went all in, had a couple of late nights, and I gave it my all, and it worked out. I guess they liked it.

John Gilland (2:21)

Now they're stuck with you. Good job, man. That's great. So my research says you came over from Hedgeye's Digital Assets Desk. So you've been in crypto for a long time, and you've been co-writing a lot of the research reports, the Chainlink piece, which Bitwise put out, which was fantastic, as well as some of the quarterly updates. Do you have a specific assigned segment of the market that you cover for Bitwise? Are you kind of like an all-purpose utility player? Tell us about what you focus on in crypto.

Ish Asad (2:46)

Yeah, on the research team at Bitwise, I'm for the most part a general all-purpose research player here. But if I had to choose a self-assigned area of focus and interest, it's definitely tokenization. That's the area that I've been focused on ever since I started in crypto five, six years ago.

So tokenization, getting into the mechanics, the weeds of how it's being done.

John Gilland (3:09)

Well, there's nothing going on with tokenization, so I'm sure we'll have nothing to talk about today. Yeah, right. It's nice to meet you, Ish. Ryan, I want to ask you about some comments I saw from Matt and get an update from you on just like the whiplash that we've seen in the markets here. Matt said that in Q2 of 2026, he saw the worst sentiment I've seen in eight years in crypto. Bitcoin was below 60K at the time. Now we're in the neighborhood of 80K.

How is the market reacting to this? What's the sentiment shift been like? And just how are your clients or what conversations you're having about this whiplash that you've seen in the crypto markets?